POINTED, POIGNANT

By Richard Scott

From The Times (London), 09.10.1994

During his early career, the director Tim Burton worked as an animator for Disney. The influence is apparent in all his feature films, which include Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and the two Batman movies, all of which are based on grotesque, cartoon-like characters existing within a stylised, artificial world, owing much to clever production design.

His finest film so far is Edward Scissorhands (Sunday, Channel 4, 9 pm), its screenplay by Caroline Thompson. It is a modern fairy story, narrated by one of its participants in old age to her grand-daughter tucked up in bed. The setting is a suburban housing development, acres of boxy American houses, identical except for their colours which comprise a pastel spectrum. Looming on a rocky tor, is a spiky, ruined castle where no one goes until the neighbourhood Avon Lady, Dianne Wiest, decides to pay a call to peddle her cosmetics.

Within its vast and dusty interior she finds a strange, gentle youth, garbed in black leather, with frightening arrays of sharp cutlery where his hands ought to be. Taking pity on him she takes him home to stay with her family, in spite of his difficulties of adjustment. Nevertheless, Edward, played with sensitivity by Johnny Depp, soon becomes popular in the community when his gifts for topiary, poodle-trimming and women's hair-cutting are hugely appreciated. He is a manmade being, created by a kindly inventor (Vincent Price in his last film role) who died before he was able to equip him with hands.

The pushiest of the neighbours (Kathy Baker) attempts a seduction which goes horribly wrong, and she turns against him. The youth has meanwhile fallen in love with Winona Ryder (in a blonde wig) who plays the daughter of Wiest and her phlegmatic husband, Alan Arkin. It can never be requited because of what he is, and she is any case dominated by her insensitive, loutish, rich-kid boyfriend, Anthony Michael Hall, who goes out of his way to goad the freakish visitor. Eventually the public perception of Edward changes and he becomes a symbol of revulsion and hatred, pursued by a baying mob to the castle gates in an obvious parallel of the 1931 Frankenstein film.

In spite of the cavernous, spooky castle and Johnny Depp's frightening appearance in his bizarre Scissorhands costume (a reminder that his film debut was in A Nightmare on Elm Street in which Robert Englund had razors for fingers), this is in no sense a horror film, instead a tender fantasy on the theme of loneliness. Edward's apartness from everyone else is reminiscent of the silent screen comedian Harry Langdon, an innocent abroad in a bustling world incapable of assimilating him. The point could be made that Burton has problems in depicting normal people. The suburbanites seem to be weird in their own right; had they been more ordinary the impact of Edward's rejection could well have been stronger. Nevertheless, it is an original and affecting story, and Danny Elfman's wistful score underlines its poignancy.